


Patch Notes:

by jetbradley



Category: Tron - All Media Types, Tron 2.0
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Identity Problems, One-Shot, POV: first person, Post-Canon, Tron: Ghost In The Machine, mental health, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29688993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jetbradley/pseuds/jetbradley
Summary: Post-Ghost in the Machine: Jet.exe regards his/their skin circuit patterns. An attempt from their perspective to come to terms with what and who they were and are.
Relationships: Jethro "Jet" Bradley & Mercury (Tron)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Patch Notes:

It had been a long day (microcycle? Millicycle? Cycle?) and Jet was more than eager to hop in a hot shower and try to forget about it. Not that he had showers in the digital world; that was one memory of user-Jet’s that he desperately wished he’d experience for himself one day. They had a code-cleanser, though, that worked in a similar manner; a capsule that he could stand in that would… _somehow_ cleanse him through use of some sort of energy instead of water. It was close enough, and he desperately needed something like it. Alone in what must have been the digital equivalent of a washroom in Mercury’s home, he derezzed the top half of his armor and turned to the mirror.

When he saw himself, he couldn’t help but stare:

Instead of a bare light brown, his skin was light gray, like thin notebook paper; and while he expected it to be blank, maybe a birthmark or some hair, he found himself carved with a filigree of patterns that glowed the same gold as the circuits on his lightsuit. Where the lightsuit’s circuits were thick and bold, these circuits were thin, some as thin as a pencil lead. The thickest circuits adorned his chest and formed the same three triangles from front of his lightsuit. But these triangles were filled with complex circuits, each triangle bearing its own subtle pattern. The leftmost triangle in the mirror—his left, but everyone else’s right, was pointed, bearing a resemblance to Red’s armor. The rightmost was still angular, but less pointed and more logical, almost like the back of a PCB. The top stood out the most out of the three, with curving lines forming swirls and patterns unlike anything he’d seen in the computer before; he winced when he remembered who had formed that top triangle. Clarence.

Clarence… He noticed the triangle pulsed with light a touch when Jet thought about him. It still glowed golden, not green, just... brighter. He leaned towards the mirror and tried it again. He pushed around in his mind, in a way, sending out a mental ping to whatever part of himself the rabbit might have run off to… The reply was less a response than a sense of familiarity. Clarence was still in him—just. Melded. Part of him now. His triangle pulsed weakly to solidify the feeling.

He pushed harder and he could remember _being_ Clarence, and the strangest part was, it didn’t feel wrong at all. He was Jet, and he had been Clarence, sometimes, for a long time. The familiarity of that, the sense of _self_ that came from thinking of Clarence’s home in their mind pre-compiling, it was both comforting and foreign. It felt like a home that wasn’t home at the same time… it felt far from him, and close enough to touch, both at the same time. One side of him—the side that must have been Clarence, which made that top triangle pulse brighter with every thought—wanted to hold onto that feeling, the comfort of having a space, even if only in their mind, where he could express himself. And the other… He didn’t want to say he was rejecting it, either. The comfort from Clarence’s corner of their mind was welcome after the day- _microcycle_ they’d had.

He couldn’t help the pang of regret that filled him when he thought about how he’d forced Clarence to combine with him. He—the part of him that was _Jet_ , whatever that even meant anymore—felt like Clarence deserved better. Something. He’d been so fed up with himself (themself), so ready to feel something other than confusion and headache and fear, and now… What was he? What had he been? Clarence’s literal castles in their mind, his wit, his strange intelligence… Red’s confidence, flamboyance, and as much as the Red side of him (almost) regretted it, his anger… and Blue’s sensitivity, pain, and empathy… All their mannerisms, hopes, dreams, beliefs, reduced to… well… feelings. That’s all they were now: a thought, an emotion, that carried with it a color, a signature; conversations reduced to _pings_ from the _voices_ they’d had. A few shared senses of “me”, and a lot that didn’t match up anymore, that he couldn’t decide between clinging to and discarding.

It didn’t make him feel sane.

It didn’t make him feel comfortable.

It felt lonely.

They-he— _Jet_ —stared at the top triangle on his chest. If there was a part of him owed an apology, it was Clarence. He’d resisted combining with the two other parts of him, he’d _begged_ for autonomy until the very end, and what they’d done to him—was this any better? He wasn’t sure. He tried to clear his mind, at least enough to be sure it was only Jet speaking—Red or Blue didn’t matter, neither were sure how to tell each other apart, only that for once they agreed—and tried to think as himself, as if he was talking to Clarence again. _Clarence. I’m-We’re sorry. About-_

The response came before they could finish putting the thought into words. Now that they really shared a consciousness and not just a body, of course Clarence knew their thoughts before they could finish them. Clarence’s reply was nonverbal; just a sense of ease he directed towards the other two. _Comfort/understanding/forgiveness_ as he’d interpret it from a program. It spread through him like a numbing shot at the dentist. But Jet shoved it away.

_-About everything, about forcing you to combine with us, destroying your home, your everything-_

Clarence replied again, disagreeing, trying to put them at ease. But as the thought filled him—how it was _necessary_ and Clarence understood that, how now that he’d seen outside of their own world in their mind, he’d seen how it was important to so many more people than themselves how they had to combine to keep a load-bearing piece of code intact—all of this expressed as a single thought, a different sensation filled Jet’s head. Not comfort. _Pain._ It spiked through his skull like a tension headache and before he knew it, he was collapsed on the sink, pulling at his hair for any sensation that would relieve the pressure from his head. He hissed and shut his eyes, trying to drown out circuits pulsing brightly, erratically, tiny dots swirling in the skin of his arms, chest, shoulders—he felt like he was going to tear himself apart. Again. And doom the Encom system over another disagreement. What would that make him/them? _Can’t even decide how to feel about something without having a goddamn breakdown—_ and that voice sounded like Red, but when Blue looked closer, he wasn’t sure if it was him or his counterpart, which was even scarier.

“Jet?”

Goddammit, he’d left the door open. And now Mercury had to see him like… whatever _this_ even was. “Hm?”

“You alright?”

He looked up at her, still grimacing a little, and offered a smile. “Yeah.” Why was his voice so strained? He ignored how little she believed them. “Yeah, yeah, I’m ok. Just looking at my uhh…” He held out an arm (that still didn’t feel like his).

“Your circuits?”

“Mmhm.”

She regarded his arm thoughtfully for a moment. She’d never seen him outside of his lightsuit, had she? It was probably one of the first times she’d seen him without the clunky game armor he’d run around when he’d been a freshly rezzed in from the Invisible realm (if he could call that _him_ ). She didn’t look away from it when she spoke. “They are complicated… I guess that makes sense, for.” She paused. “A user.”

The word made Jet feel even less Jetlike than before. “Users don’t have skin circuits.”

“They don’t?”

He shook his head. “None. None at all. ‘T’s just blank.”

“Huh.” She looked away to process that bit of information. That’s right… after everything that had happened since he left the computer—or, before he’d been compiled, or… no, it hurt his head to think about it—he’d forgotten that outside of Blue’s wishful thinking, the pair had never been anything more than friends. If they’d even been that. She took her hand off Jet’s arm.

She touched her hand to her glove, and it derezzed, along with a section of armor extending from her wrist to her elbow. She held it next to Jet’s arm. Her circuits were almost as thin as Jet’s, though not quite; but they didn’t cover as much of her skin. They crept along her arm vertically, as if someone had dipped a ruler in shining ink and laid them out by touching its edge to her skin; they didn’t curve or bend nearly as much as Jet’s did. “Well, I’m just a game bot, so mine aren’t nearly as precise.”

He shook his head. “Just a game bot? Weren’t you the champion?” That got a smirk out of her. He leaned over to look at the lines on her arm. “So the circuits tell you… how someone was programmed?”

“More or less.” She looked up at him. “A longer program needs to fit more information on that space, so it makes sense that simpler ones have less circuits.”

“Well, Merc, y’know, Users usually consider cleaner code better than unnecessarily long code.”

“Is that so?” She grinned. “I’ve never heard a simple-coded program brag about being _clean.”_

“Well, clean code means less bugs—and faster, too.”

“Hm.”

She rerezzed her armor but left her glove off. With her free hand, she reached over and patted Jet’s wrist. “You take it easy. You had a rough compiling. I don’t want to find out you’ve hurt yourself before a chance to get a good sleep cycle.”

“Man, you don’t even _know.”_ He laughed. “Thanks mom.” To that, she left wordlessly and shut the door behind her.

Alone again, the _Jet_ in him looked in the mirror, eyes focusing back on the alien-looking man behind it. He couldn’t look himself in the eye, not without a piece of him reminiscing for a crown, a cape, that he’d once taken pride in and now felt shame for wanting. Instead, he looked back down at their arms. Upon closer inspection, they had the same detailed designs as the inside of their triangles, but arranged not in divided shapes, but patches. Some circuits meandering in planned angles and terminating in small dots, as if soldered, in Blue’s; some crossing, bending with sharp edges in some sections like Red’s; and some swirling, folding into spirals and vortices like Clarence’s.

There wasn’t much of a rhyme or reason to it. Some patches were larger than others, some smaller than a finger; Red found himself smiling from inside them somewhere when he spotted a scar from a fight he’d picked at grade school, that Blue hadn’t remembered and had cried in the principal’s office about, rendered in his angular circuit style. But no section had a proper border or real seam between them; while he could see where one started and another ended, the circuits were all connected, energy flowing easily from one section to the next. Some familiar, some not; all endless, all new, all the same golden he’d come to recognize as much as him as the red, green, and blue that stretched to the beginning of his memory.


End file.
